Chants - 7/10

Astral Plane drops its second release pretty soon after the grim grind of Shalt’s ‘Acheron’ EP, which was a forceful way of letting us know that the label will be specialising in abstract club music that not everyone knows how to dance to.

While ‘Acheron’ was a wild ride through the black, Chants’ ‘The Zookeeper’ is a brighter affair and all the more engaging for it. There’s a slightly scuffed feel to each of the five tracks more usually found on analogue house cuts, and a cunning use of contrast, both in textures and the way broken melodies are used to lighten the load of crushing beats and driving bass.

Opener ‘Silencer Magpie’ fires off rounds of machine gun drums, with a soft vocal snip played like keys; the brilliantly titled ‘Crushed Lollipop’ is a march of distortion and wonky Casio groove, and the title track is a humongous, triumphant slab of rough-hewn grime. Two ambient tracks, ‘Sussurus Pt. 1’ and ‘Sussurus Pt. 2’, break up the record, like sunlight coming through the cracks in drawn blinds, and both are reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s ‘Avril 14th’.

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